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4G vs. 3G vs. WiFi Throughput For Samsung's Epic 4G

Posted by timothy on from the taste-of-things-to-come dept.

MojoKid writes "Some of the most popular Android smartphones currently available are members of Samsung's Galaxy S line. Powered by Samsung's own 1GHz ARM Cortex A8-based Hummingbird processor with a four-inch Super-AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, it's no wonder Samsung has sold over 5 million Galaxy S phones. The Epic 4G variant of this phone, available through Sprint, is also one of the scant few 4G capable devices on the market currently. Sprint's 4G network utilizes WiMAX mobile broadband, with a theoretical maximum throughput of 40Mbps. Sprint claims that the average download speed on its 4G network is between 3 to 6Mbps, with peak download speeds above 10Mbps. The performance figures seen here actually show solid throughput for the Epic, besting competitive 3G devices and even versus some with a Wi-Fi connection. 4G WiMAX service is still rather limited geographically, but hopefully devices like these will help to kick the roll-out into gear a bit."

4 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Anecdote by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Living in one of the better covered 4G cities, my personal experience is that both WiMAX availability and throughput vary widely within the metro area. I would describe the WiMAX coverage as "spotty." When available it seems uniformly faster than 3G on my and my friends' phones. I have seen it get as high as 8Mbps download and as low as 1Mbps download (using speedtest.net). Coverage tends to get better as you near the city's core.

    Throughput seems a difficult thing to measure, as it varies so widely in my experience.

    1. Re:Anecdote by fsterman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Mod parent up.

      I used to sell for the network that Sprint uses for it's "4g" coverage- it's total crap. Even at fixed positions, the signal waxes and wanes significantly. Only the most naive of customers were really satisfied with it, the rest hated it.

      Maybe this test was at a good location, but the overall experience is just as spotty as current data networks.

      --
      Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
  2. Re:iPhone 4 by toastar · · Score: 2, Interesting

    That the Samsung Epic is the fastest phone that they tested.

    In other news my i7 Laptop scores better on benchmarks then my compaq 386...
    Could they really not find a G2 to test?

    Something I recently learned about android is how important the kernel is to download speeds, I went from 1mbps with stock android to 2-3mpbs with biffmod, with stock cm6 I only got. 300kbps.

    On one test I got 3.2Mbps.... Which is higher then what they're getting here... and this is on my G1.

  3. Re:LTE by sonicmerlin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    LTE, LTE a and WiMax 2 has much better latency than WiMax. TeliaSonera in Sweden has a commercial LTE network running with latencies of 20-40 ms in real usage settings. It's ridiculously fast. Online gaming over wireless will be great.